Harvesting or nurturing? Corporate venture capital and startup green innovation

Abstract

Corporate venture capital (CVC) investors now regularly back startups engaged in green innovation, yet their motivations and the causal impact of their investments on startups' green innovation remain unclear. We examine heterogeneous CVC selection and treatment effects on venture green innovation, conditional on corporate parents' green complementary resources. We draw on institutional logics to theorize CVCs as a group, and resource complementarity arguments to explain differences among CVC investors. Utilizing unique matched investment and patenting data (2000–2021) for ventures from 27 European countries funded by VCs during 2004–2019, we employ difference-in-differences models to separate treatment from selection effects and to test the heterogeneity of the treatment effects. We find that CVC investors preferentially select ventures exhibiting higher pre-investment green innovation, an effect driven by those whose parent corporations actively engage in green innovation themselves, indicating substantive rather than symbolic motives behind these investments. Critically, post-investment nurturing of green innovation depends on investor heterogeneity: only CVC investors whose parent corporations possess complementary green innovation resources significantly increase their portfolio ventures' subsequent green innovation.

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